WhatCounts Blog

5 things all email marketers need to know

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Christopher Penn

5 on Flickr: saveoursmile Email marketing is a beautiful thing.

It’s timely, targeted, valuable, measurable, relevant, and has the highest return on investment of any other marketing channel ($40.56 for every $1 spent, according to the DMA). When it comes to this revenue-producing, highly effective medium, it’s important to note that all email programs are different, and what works for you may not work for your competitors, partners, friends, etc.

So, while there are many standard best practices, tactics, and strategies to suggest to marketers, it’s important to always be testing to see if that specific recommendation will work for you and your audience. But, there are a few noteworthy things that all email marketers should keep mind when it comes to building a successful program.

5 Things All Email Marketers Need to Know

1. Buying lists = bad; Growing your list organically = good

To most seasoned, savvy email marketers, this is a no-brainer. Unfortunately, there are many email marketers who either have no idea how badly purchasing a list can harm their business, or they simply choose to ignore this advice. To get positive results from your email efforts, it takes a strong, engaged audience. The only results you’ll see when purchasing a list (and essentially spamming everyone on it) is getting blacklisted by the ISPs, fired by your email service provider, and harming your business’s reputation. We can’t say this enough: do not purchase email addresses. Grow your list organically. Doing this over time may take longer than purchasing a list of 30,000 names, but it will produce more opens, clicks, and conversions, and makes it more likely for your subscribers to keep coming back for more. Trust us on this. Still not convinced? Read “When is it Okay to Buy an Email List?”, the shortest WhatCounts blog post ever written.

Get 50 ways to grow your list now (a free WhatCounts eBook).

2. Quality over Quantity

Do you believe that one of our clients dropped 84% of subscribers from their list, yet saw an increase in engagement and sales? Believe it. Read more about COMP Performance Group’s re-engagement campaign, which took them from almost 58,000 subscribers to just under 10,000. Shocking numbers, right? Actually, no. Their list is more engaged, their open rate has increased, and conversions (sales) have been steady and ongoing.

Everyone knows why sales are important, but I bet some of you are wondering why engagement matters so much. The ISPs (Internet Service Providers, think: Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL) determine whether your email gets through to the inbox, and they’re now looking at engagement when doing so. They want to make sure your subscribers are clicking through, sharing, and simply interacting with your emails; the way they determine this is by looking at your metrics (this is why it’s important to get rid of the dead weight). How many people on your list are opening, clicking through, and sharing? Run a re-engagement campaign, offer preference centers and frequency options, and segment your list. Quality over quantity is more important than ever.

3. Expectations can make all the difference

Setting expectations with your subscribers up front can make quite the difference when it comes to getting your emails opened and acted upon. Think about it: if you only ask for someone’s email address on your opt-in form, they have no idea what they’re in for. If you warn people up front (explain how often you send emails, what the content will be, etc.), they are much more likely to subscribe, open your emails, and look forward to future messages from you. Here are a few guidelines when it comes to setting expectations:

Content. Explain the type of content you send. Is it a newsletter? Do you provide deals and discounts? Let potential recipients know what they’re signing up for.
Frequency. Tell subscribers how often you will send them email (include this information on your opt-in form and in your subscriber preferences center). Better yet, let them choose the frequency at which they can hear from you. At WhatCounts we provide a weekly newsletter, but subscribers can sign up for a monthly summary if they’d prefer that instead.
Look & Feel. You can even show people what your emails will look like so that it will be easily recognizable to them. Also, tell them what from address and from name you use so that they can whitelist that address and recognize the from name when you send.

The key to setting expectations is actually following through with them. Make good on your promises, and your subscribers will love you all the more for it.

4. Clicks > Opens

When analyzing your campaign metrics, pay closer attention to clicks than opens. In many cases, an “open” is only recorded when images are displayed. For subscribers who always have images turned off, they may see your email (namely text and alt tags), and they may click through, but it might never be recorded as an open. This is why many in the industry call an “open” rate a “render” rate. Also, you know that handy dandy preview pane in Outlook? Many of us use that to view emails – and can act on those emails – but never actually double-click to open the full email. So, while a 30% open rate is better than a 3% open rate, pay closer attention to the click-through rate.

5. Relationship is King

Anyone could argue that content or permission (the list goes on) is king, but I’m going to make the bold statement in this particular post that in email marketing, relationship is king. If you’re trusted by your subscribers and provide valuable information, they will look forward to receiving your emails and are more likely to open, click through, share, and convert on your emails. If I receive a sketchy-looking email (unrecognizable from name, “spammy”-looking, etc.) from a company I don’t really know, I am highly unlike to convert on that email. However, if a brand I trust, like Social Fresh, offers content that looks valuable to me, I am much more likely to act on their call-to-action and convert. I see their name in my inbox and open the email knowing that I want to read their content, no matter what the subject line is. While all email marketing programs are different, here are a few tips for building a relationship through email marketing:

Provide valuable content. Write for the subscriber, not you. Solve a problem for them, make their life easier.
Listen. Monitor your reply-to address, ask for feedback, and respond to both. Carry this over into your social media marketing by “being there” on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Incorporate branding. Use your company name in your from name and subject line. Make your email design familiar to subscribers and be consistent.
Follow through with expectations. Remember those expectations we talked about earlier? Follow through with any you set in the beginning (see #3 above), and honor subscribers’ privacy, too.

While there are many things that all email marketers need to know, these five insights apply to most and will help you build a successful email marketing program. What are your top tips for email marketing? Share in the comments below!

Amy Garland
Strategic Account Manager, WhatCounts

Are you making the most of your email marketing program? If you haven't incorporated Lifecycle Email Marketing, you're leaving money on the table. Click here to download and read our Lifecycle Email Marketing White Paper and find out what your email marketing program is missing.

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How Pinterest can benefit email marketers

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Christopher Penn

How can marketers use the power of email and Pinterest together to drive retail sales?

I’m sure you have heard, joined or read about Pinterest at some point in the last few months. Although Pinterest has been around since March 2010 and is still an invite only social network, it recently has been gaining a tremendous amount of traction and popularity.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Pinterest, here’s a quick primer. If you’re familiar with Delicious and other link saving services, Pinterest is a more visual version of those.

Pinning is easy with the Pin It button, a simple drag and drop browser extension. Pinterest is a great way to drive traffic back to your site. Each pinned photo includes a link back to the source site (you click once to see the pin page and again to see the source site). Most pins are photos, but you can pin videos too. If a video link is pinned, Pinterest embeds that video inside the pin. It’s a good way of spreading a tip when it has to be seen to be understood. Repins and likes share a common interest, making it easier to take the conversation to Twitter and Facebook to nurture the relationship.

Pinterest offers a way for brands to build interaction with their audiences and to visually attract current and potential customers. Using the power of image, companies can create interest around products, display more in depth aspects of their business, and ultimately create more personal and visually pleasing social experiences for their audiences.

Once your business has created a Pinterest profile, get the ‘follow’ button for your website so that consumers are encouraged to pin your content and products if they choose. Like all social networks, it’s not simply enough to put the button there though. You need to give users a reason to use it. Interacting with users or giving them useful content that benefits them, beyond what you’re trying to market or sell, will go a long way towards making you more popular on the site. Use this opportunity to build your brand by linking and connecting to people who share the same style or by pinning images that inspire your company’s work. Showcase your style, what makes you different, what your brand stands for and use it as an opportunity to highlight your employees too. Putting a face to your brand is easily done with Pinterest.

Now let’s talk about how your company can utilize this platform to your advantage and drive retail sales.

Improve your click-throughs and spread the word about a new product.

Include your social media campaigns in your emails to build a relationship with your audience. Launch a daily pin theme or have a contest. At a minimum, have links to your Pinterest page in your social sharing section of your email.

Create a daily pin to promote your brand; these usually lead to repeat visitors.

Contests can engage your audience and also get them to your site, browsing your products and linking to them.

When pinning a product, add the product’s price in the description. Doing this will automatically place a banner over the image with the price listed and will also be shown in the gift section of the Pinterest site. This is a way of getting more of a direct response from marketing on Pinterest.

If you’re sending out a weekly newsletter or email, include something like, “See who pinned our products this week” or “Check out which of our products are getting the most attention (pinned) this week by other followers”, in your email linking them to a board you have created showing the results. This is a great way to listen to the customer and show them that you’re listening.

Pinterest’s audience is highly engaged and can easily contribute to your social media campaign going viral. Popular images (with links back to the original source) can get repined on hundreds of other user’s boards. The possibilities with Pinterest are endless. Get on board and start pinning!

Madison Murphy
Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

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Grow your email marketing ROI with affiliate sales

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Christopher Penn

Want to know one of the secrets of growing your email marketing ROI?

Affiliate sales.

If you’re not familiar with affiliate sales, it’s a way for companies to “hire” independent publishers to sell their goods and services. Affiliate sales is commission-based sales – every time you mention a product or service, if your mention of it sells the product, you as a publisher earn a percentage of the sale.

Here’s the power of affiliate sales programs when it comes to your email marketing: virtually every email you send has the ability to include some synergistic offer for a related product that you can earn a commission on with little extra work. Let’s use one of our clients, True Citrus, the maker of the True Lemon and True Lime products. They have a wonderful newsletter called The Main Squeeze that contains all of the different ways you can use their products.

In their newsletter, they feature the Salmon and Spring Lettuce Salad. Notice that they provide a great recipe for the salad (which looks very tasty, doesn’t it?). Here’s the affiliate marketing opportunity: many of the ingredients in their recipe can be bought from a site like Amazon.com, which has the Amazon Associates program. Signing up for the program earns you referral fees between 4% and 15% depending on your volume.

Let’s go back to the Salmon salad. True Citrus could link to frozen salmon filets available for sale on Amazon and a small percentage of their readers would likely purchase the salmon filets as they were reading the recipe. Likewise, they could link up the dijon mustard to an organic dijon mustard, as well as the olive oil, etc.

It may not seem worth doing – after all, 4% of a $45 salmon steak is a mere $1.80. However, the power of great email marketing is that you can reach millions of people with your content. Small referral fees multiplied by massive audiences turn into real revenue.

Let’s look at another example of how this might work. Let’s say you had a million subscriber list, a 10% open rate, a 2% clickthrough rate, and a 25% conversion rate for your main product, automobile insurance. You know by default that the people on your list either have or will have a car very soon.

Let’s say you find a Bluetooth headset for hands-free driving (safer!) for $100 on which you earn $4 of commission. In addition to the income you’d earn promoting your automotive insurance, you’d earn an additional $2,000 in referral fees with those same email marketing metrics by offering the headset beneath your product in your newsletter. Best of all, you haven’t had to stock any inventory, handle any purchases or returns, or deal with the headset manufacturer. You’ve simply provided a link that adds relevant value in your newsletter.

Now multiply that $2,000 times your monthly newsletter and suddenly your newsletter has added $24,000/year to your bottom line with very little extra work on your part.

Where would you go to get started with affiliate programs as an email publisher? Take a look obviously at massive retailers like Amazon.com, but also look at networks like Commission Junction, Shareasale, Linkshare, and many others. (Note: WhatCounts is not affiliated with any of these companies yet. If you work for one of them and would like to talk about email marketing, you know where to find us)

Sign up for programs that offer relevant, timely, valuable products and services that synergize well with your own products or services, and you’ll increase the income that your email marketing delivers to your company, boosting your ROI.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

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The 30 second email sales pitch

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Christopher Penn

Every sales professional with more than a day’s training is at least familiar with the idea of the 30 second pitch, the elevator speech, or whatever you want to call the short introductory message. What separates the best sales professionals from the rest of the pack is what happens in that 30 second pitch.

The least effective sales professionals try to cram their entire company’s life story, product features and benefits, and sales call to action in that 30 seconds. It sounds frantic, desperate, and so confusing that few people, if any, ever buy. Prospects simply nod their heads, offer a polite or direct decline, and dismiss the salesperson without a second thought.

The most effective sales professionals whittle away everything from their pitch except the bare essentials, something so obvious and so plain that everyone who sees or hears it can immediately understand the value with little thought. You never have to work to understand the 30 second pitch from an effective salesperson, and your first reaction is, “Tell me more about that…”

Email is no different. The first email you send to a prospect is your first impression, your 30 second pitch. It might be welcoming a potential new volunteer, a new congregation member, a prospective buyer, a potential new hire – whoever it is, an email is about to make that first impression. What kind of impression will that email make?

Let’s examine what a bad sales pitch in an email might look like. Before we begin, please grab a cup of coffee and drink it quickly, as the following bad pitch is likely to cause you to fall asleep or zone out, and I’d like you back as quickly as possible.

Email doesn’t have to be difficult. Our core business is providing effective and innovative email marketing solutions. We can handle every aspect of an email campaign, whether it be design, delivery, analytics, copywriting, or something outside the box, we focus on achieving your online marketing goals. Click here to find out more about our email services and to contact a representative.

Our expert team of cross-functional professionals provide our clients with effective and innovative email marketing solutions. We help our customers achieve email marketing success through a combination of stellar proactive account management, superb creative services, and solid technology. Collaborating with WhatCounts will offer you a unique, pleasurable experience that is routinely reaffirmed by our clients, both new and old.

WhatCounts is an industry leading email service provider. Through their web-based email marketing application and commitment to exceptional client services, WhatCounts helps companies grow their business through email marketing. By integrating their online platform with industry-standard tools including Google Analytics, Salesforce.com, and prominent social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, WhatCounts provides marketers with the tools they need to create, deliver, and track full customizable online marketing campaigns. Founded in 2001, WhatCounts works with clients in industries including tourism, communications, education, entertainment, finance, government, healthcare, retail, and technology.

This is actual copy from old stuff we used to send out at WhatCounts. Fairly hideous, isn’t it? Somewhere in there might be something that a prospect values, but the chances of them extracting that value before a coma sets in is fairly low.

Let’s examine now a better pitch. Hopefully, you won’t need coffee for this one.

Imagine there is a black box that sits on your desk with a slot in the top that accepts $1 bills and a small tray in front. Every time you put $1 in that box, $41 comes out the tray.

How often would you put $1 bills in that box?

Email marketing is that box if you know how to use it well. Would you like a box on your desk like this? Call us and learn how you can get one from WhatCounts at 866-804-0076.

What are the elements that make this a better email pitch?

It’s concise. It’s clear. There’s no jargon at all. The benefit is obvious, the emotion being appealed to is blatant, and instead of spewing facts at a prospect, the pitch starts off by asking them to imagine something, to mentally engage instead of disengage. The pitch tells a very short story with you, the reader, as the subject of the story, and ends with a firm call to action.

Most of all, the pitch doesn’t try to get you to buy immediately. Instead of pressuring for the sale, the pitch aims to raise questions in your mind as starting points for a future discussion. If you delivered a pitch like this in person, there’s a good chance your prospect would ask if you could grab a cup of coffee or lunch and tell them more about this magic money box. Make that the goal of your 30 second pitch – not “buy buy buy” but “tell me more”.

Take your existing 30 second pitch and write it down. Look for similar elements in your own pitch, refine it, and then use it in your first prospect email campaigns, auto-responses, and outreach communications. See if the results you get are dramatically better than an information dump that causes prospects to glaze over after the first giant run-on sentence.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

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When triggered campaigns go wrong…

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Christopher Penn

Back in October my wife and I were planning a trip to Bermuda. For those of you that haven’t been, it can be an expensive vacation destination if you don’t find the right deals.

So I set out looking for the best deal on a flight from Baltimore to Bermuda and ended up at lowfares.com. As many travel sites do, they required I give them my email address to see the current prices.

Fast forward three months later, long after I have taken my trip, I receive the following email:

The intent of any marketing email should be to deliver a timely, relevant, and awe inspiring (thanks Allen) message. This particular communication missed the mark on all three. The subject line for starters was “Breaking Deals for Your Trip from BWI to BDA!” which certainly could be timely and relevant; however, as I said my trip was in October. When searching for a flight, what is the first thing you enter after your From and To information? The dates you wish to both depart and return. If captured, they would’ve been able to easily put a qualifier in their segmentation to exclude anybody with a trip date that has passed.

Going beyond that, this particular website is focused on airfare and the header even includes the text “Fare Alert!” Yet when you scroll down to the flights section, we are greeted with “We could not find any flight deals for this trip.” So if they did not have a deal to offer, why bother sending? The ideal segmentation would automatically remove anyone that they do not currently have a relevant offer for. Without the offer, what does the sender or recipient have to gain?

Final Thoughts

Setting up a triggered campaign can be a time consuming process on the front end. During that process it can be very easy to overlook something when developing your triggers. As email marketers and marketers in general, we would all love to find the perfect “set it and forget it” campaign.

Despite how efficient and effective a triggered or drip campaign can be, you should still regularly be checking your results. Make sure you’re looking for ways to optimize your performance. And look for any individual communications that aren’t performing up to standards and evaluate why.

Joe Sisler
Strategic Account Manager, WhatCounts

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When is the best time for a webinar?

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Christopher Penn

Chances are you’ve signed up, attended, did not attend or presented a webinar. If you’re a marketer who is involved in scheduling lead-generation webinars, you’ve probably asked yourself “What are the best days and times to host public webinars?”.

A common mistake that I see is when time zone is the only factor considered when scheduling the webinar. It really depends a great deal on the industry and your audience and what works best for them. For example, when you are targeting sales professionals, you need to consider everything (month/date/day/time). In most companies, normally the sales meetings will be every Monday. So you will want to avoid Monday’s and at the end of the month (or end of the quarter) because that’s when they are focusing on making their quota.

You cannot know what motivates and inspires each and every one of your participants, but you can have a general idea and focus. So, how do you find out more about your audience?

Interaction, of course! Any webinar software package worth using will include the following:
• Custom Registration Questions
• Polls
• Questions & Answers
• Chat
• Surveys

This is your opportune moment to capture plenty of data. Take poll questions during the webinar and send out post webinar surveys. Don’t forget to ask the people who registered for your webinar, but did not attend. A good way to do this would be to ask people when they register for your webinar, on the registration page. Another way is to create a survey that you include in your follow up email to all of your webinar registrants, after the webinar. This way, you are reaching out to everyone who registered for you webinar, rather than just those who attended. Find out what works best for them.

In one of our recent webinars, we sent out a post webinar survey to our entire audience asking which days and times they consider best for attending webinars. Results showed that a good time to hold a webinar is 10 AM PT/1 PM ET on either Wednesday or Thursday. That gets West and East Coast people an hour after start of business, or an hour after lunch time.

Madison Murphy
Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

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What leftover holiday cards can teach you about email content

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Christopher Penn

Now that the holidays are over and you’re cleaning out all the junk, let’s take a look at the cards you received from those dear, and not so dear to you, in the mail… yes, the ones with stamps that show up to your residential postal address.

1. The CopyCenter professionally printed family picture. It’s from your third cousin or your dentist, and the signatures are part of the template. Everyone is smiling, but the photo doesn’t really give you much more to look at after a first glance, except maybe a question of “Wait,who is that kid in the front row, all the way to the left?” Then it goes in a pile of other cards like it.

2. The essay type form letter from your sister-in-law…It’s not something you usually read (all four trifolded pages) beginning to end, because it’s long, and all about them. It is not a card with well wishes, but just an assumption that you are extremely interested about their fifth grader’s math grades and their recent trip to Yellowstone National Park. Yawn.

3. The card you get from a close friend, family member or acquaintance that gives a sincere, personalized wish, and a “call to action” if you will, of their great hopes for you, to make the best of the new year. They might include a photo in the fold, or remember that you’re a book lover and drop in an Amazon gift card. You’ll probably not only read the medium length note and feel appreciated by the nice thought, but place it on the mantle for display, going back to it when you need a kind word. You might even write back thanking them for the card!

I would hope that I’m not the only one that can read into intentions, content and length of these types of communication. They are distinct with their motives, and typical in response.

So what can we take away from holiday cards and put it in the terms of email marketing?

1. Short, impersonal, cookie cutter emails don’t leave your subscriber with a feeling of your investment in them. An obviously generic mailing doesn’t make for opens or click through rates.

2. Long-winded, boring, self-serving emails containing too much information and news they can’t use will make them not only close it before they’re halfway through, but give them the foresight not to read your next campaign.

3. Personalized, relevant emails that take the subscriber into consideration are the ones that garner the highest open and click-through rates. They have an audience that is engaged, and looks forward to future emails. Including poignant images, links and incentives to keep your interest is a going to create a loyal customer.

So wouldn’t it be worth your while to analyze your email length, content, links, images and audience? It’s important to go through a regular email audit with an outside source, as we all know it’s hard to see the forest for the trees.

Being able to have a different perspective of what your subscribers are receiving is invaluable, and will make it more likely you’ll get a virtual thank you card.

Kelsey Strand-Polyak
Strategic Account Manager, WhatCounts

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Ask for the referral in email

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Christopher Penn

Want an incredible boost to your sales efforts? One of the most important activities taught to every rookie salesperson from day 1 is to ask for the referral. At the end of the sales process, ask for the referral – ask a presumably happy customer to refer someone to you. Just bought a car? If the salesperson is any good, they’ll ask if you know anyone else looking for the car you just bought. Just purchased insurance? The agent will ask who else in your family needs coverage.

Why? Referrals and word of mouth advertising are some of the best converting business opportunities you can have. As long as customers are happy with you, referrals convert better, buy more, and buy more often than random people you do business with because they’re powered by word of mouth and trust. (obviously, if customers are not happy, fix that first)

Astonishingly, almost no one asks for a referral by email:

In an admittedly anecdotal, unscientific survey of 20 different purchase confirmations in my inbox archives, only one even asks me to sign up for their newsletter. None ask for a referral.

What are some of the ways you could ask for a referral?

Ask for the referral in the confirmation message after a purchase.
Ask for the referral in the subscription confirmation in your newsletter.
Send a 7 day post-purchase followup email and ask if the customer is satisfied and who else needs one.
Depending on your business, send a 1 year “anniversary” email celebrating the day you started doing business with the customer, and ask for the referral.
Ask for the referral in your daily/weekly/monthly newsletter consistently.
Ask for the referral on your blog.
If you have the ability to track return visitors on your web site, ask them to refer someone every now and then.

Ask for the referral as frequently as you reasonably can. It doesn’t have to be in-your-face-bold all the time, but make sure the opportunity for a referral exists in all of your communications to existing customers. As long as you fulfill the promises you make to them and they’re happy, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose from referral business.

How you ask is as important as asking. Specificity is the secret of referral marketing. If you ask a customer to think about someone who might want your product or service, chances are they won’t. Be specific! Here’s an example. Which of these referral requests is likely to deliver more business to you?

If you know anyone who could use our services, please forward this message to them.
Who do you know at your company that would also benefit from our services?
%name%, which two friends of yours have you been hesitant to tell about their breath? Click here and pick 3 very subtle hints you can send them.

The last referral is highly specific, which is coupled with a landing page with pre-written copy, is likely perform the best as it asks for a concrete number of referrals, identifies who is the best candidate for a referral, and reduces or removes any anxiety about what to say in a referral. As long as the referral copy is creative and fulfills the promise, it will do well.

I’d be failing to follow my own advice if I didn’t ask you to refer one other person you’re connected with in social media to subscribe to the WhatCounts newsletter right now. Want even more tips? Download our free eBook, Email for Sales, and get all of our sales-focused email advice in one easy read.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

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Gestalt Principles of Email Design: Similarity

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Christopher Penn

What makes an email stand out? Certainly, the WhatCounts email marketing mantra of sending relevant, timely, targeted, valuable content to people who asked for it is a great place to start, but as any retailer will tell you, packaging matters a whole lot. For the purposes of capturing interest, the packaging matters more than the content – ask anyone if presents under a holiday shrubbery are more or less intriguing if gift wrapped.

So how do you design an email message, a creative in design lingo, to do what you want it to do? Certainly we tell you to test, to try different things, but what sort of framework might be helpful in creating great email?

A framework created by Christian von Ehrenfels known as Gestalt Perception may shed some light on effective email creative design. Gestalt Perception tells us of 6 basic laws of perception:

Law of Closure — The mind may experience elements it does not perceive through sensation, in order to complete a regular figure (that is, to increase regularity).
Law of Similarity — The mind groups similar elements into collective entities or totalities. This similarity might depend on relationships of form, color, size, or brightness.
Law of Proximity — Spatial or temporal proximity of elements may induce the mind to perceive a collective or totality.
Law of Symmetry (Figure ground relationships)— Symmetrical images are perceived collectively, even in spite of distance.
Law of Continuity — The mind continues visual, auditory, and kinetic patterns.
Law of Common Fate — Elements with the same moving direction are perceived as a collective or unit.

Source: Wikipedia

Let’s dissect just one of these laws today and look at the law of similarity. The mind sees similar things as a cohesive unit. This is generally a good thing, in the sense that if you had to mentally parse every leaf on a tree, you’d go insane. Our minds just collect all of the individual points together and turn them into the collective unit we call a tree.

That said, suppose that you needed to be dissimilar. Suppose in your email creative, there was one thing you needed people to immediately discern and pay attention to, such as a call to action to buy, donate, or act. Rather than just yell louder about the call to action, take this Gestalt law and put it to work. Make everything that’s less essential a little more similar in color, size, tone, contrast, and shape, and make the call to action dissimilar so that it’s noticeable even from far away.

Step away from your screen. Take a few steps back. Can you see the dissimilar item in the picture above?

Step back even farther. See how far away you can get from your screen until you can’t discern the dissimilar element that draws your attention.

Do this with your email creative. See if you can easily discern what the most important item is supposed to be. See if your eyes and mind pick it out quickly and easily, and if you can’t, then keep working on this design principle using things like color, size, contrast, lines, shape, font, etc. until you can.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

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5 tips to optimize your mobile email marketing

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Christopher Penn

The following is a guest post by Jon-Mikel Bailey. Read more about him at the conclusion.

iPhones Mobile is here and it’s growing leaps and bounds every day. Lots of people check their email on their mobile devices – Blackberries, iPhones, Droids, etc. And some are probably checking their email there more than on their desktop. Which brings up one scary thought…what does your email marketing campaign look like on a mobile device?

If you’ve never thought about this you are probably breaking out in a cold sweat right now. If you have, you might not have considered the next part of this thought: Does it convert? It’s OK, we all worry. But luckily there are some fairly simple things you can do to make sure your email marketing campaign is just as effective on a mobile device as it is on a desktop.

It breaks down to the same core principles that apply to most forms of electronic communication, code and design. We have put together a list of 5 simple techniques to apply to your email marketing campaign to ensure it is effective on mobile devices. Let’s start with what they see in their inbox.

1 – Make sure your subject line and preheader are working together…

A preheader is the text that shows you see in a mobile inbox from an email. Mainly this is reserved for things like “Click Here for a Printable Version” or “Having Trouble Viewing This? Click Here”. This is also about as much as the recipient will ever read of your email marketing campaign if you don’t do something creative to grab their attention.

This is because oftentimes, marketers will miss an opportunity here to capture the interest of the reader and get them to open the email. Think about it, most mobile devices will show the subject line and the preheader without any real hook to get the you to open the email.

iPhone Preheader Sample

As they scroll through their inbox this is what they see. If you are creative with your preheader you may be able to cut through the clutter and get them to open the email. Try using this space to grab their attention, think of it as the next part of your subject line, what you would say in the actual subject line if you had the space: The Subject —> The Grab!

There is a great article on this at MediaPost, talking specifically about subject lines and preheaders: Subject Line + Preheader: The Perfect Mobile Pairing

2 – Can they read it?

One of the easiest fixes in mobile email marketing is readability. Devices will all render emails differently. To have the most effective cross platform reach, start with the content, can it be read from any mobile device?

Email marketing services will allow you to create a text only version of your newsletter. Devices that do not support HTML in email will usually automatically revert to this plain text version in the reader (with active links).

I’ve seen it suggested to create a .TXT version of your email campaign and link to that from your HTML email. My problem with this is that the links will not be active, meaning the recipient will need to copy and paste the link into a new browser. This kills the whole idea for me.

Instead try creating a simple HTML version that is designed at a baseline to work in all mobile browsers. Then link to this in the preheader – “View Mobile Version”. When they click this link they will be taken to a mobile version of the email newsletter designed specifically to work in mobile browsers, such as something like this…

As you can see, the text still renders nicely and the links are all still active – driving branding and conversion.

3. With HTML, Design with Mobile in mind…

Now comes the tricky part. How do I design an HTML email that will render correctly in devices that display HTML emails? The main thing to worry about is screen resolution. You are going to be primarily concerned with width, the horizontal display of your email.

Typically the real estate you are working with on a mobile screen is in the neighborhood of 350px X 380px. This varies depending on the device and what menus are present at the top and bottom of the viewing area. So, it is best to design them and then view versions in phone simulators.

iPhones will generally size the HTML email to fit in the screen (see sample below). Some devices will show it full size. So if your HTML email is designed at 600px wide, the reader will need to scroll horizontally to view the content. This is not good. Your best bet is to design for the lowest common denominator – at least for the width.

iPhone Email Newsletter

4. Best practices still apply…

Remember that good design is always backed by responsible coding and effective layout. If you are designing for the user and device in mind, you will be in good shape. So, take certain things into consideration like images, or the layout of your information.

Some phones will not load an image automatically (Outlook does this too, so this tip applies to desktops as well). Use ALT text in your images so if an image is not loaded, the viewer will at least see some text in its place that is relevant instead of phonepic55.jpg. If your email is about roasting turkeys and you have an image of a roasted turkey, use the ALT Text = Roasted Turkey.

And when it comes to links, be smart about placement. Layout here is very important. If you want someone to click on a link, don’t bury it with other links or clutter. Set it apart and make it accessible. This is especially important on touch screens. Some of us fat finger types might click on the wrong thing and get frustrated. Frustration leads to departure, which leads to an ineffective email.

HTML5 is going to play heavily into this in the days ahead, check out our lastest post about HTML5.

5. Mobile is the best place to refine your Call to Action (CTA)…

Think about it – this can be a difficult place to convert. The recipient is on the move and usually very distracted. You have limited visual real estate and multiple compatibility issues to overcome. This is the perfect place to refine your CTAs. What better place than the most difficult one to develop a killer CTA approach?

When you design your HTML email, do some testing on multiple devices. At the very least you can use a device simulator. See what your email will look like on a mobile device. Are your CTAs obvious? Do they draw attention? Is it clear where they will take you? If they are effective here, you can be sure they will be effective on a desktop.

Mobile is here, be ready…

As mobile devices grow in popularity and daily usage, we will see better ways to monitor the effectiveness of these efforts. For now, the stats you have available will tell you a good deal anyway (talk to your provider about their stats or Google Analytics). So, make sure you are tracking what users are on when reading your email newsletters. I guarantee you that mobile will pop up more and more in the coming days and months.

Remember, effective marketing takes planning, testing and flexibility. Be open to different approaches and be aware of what your readers use to access your information. And don’t worry, if you follow these tips you should be in good shape. Good luck!

Image: Flickr – ivyfield

Jon-Mikel Bailey
President, Business Development, Wood Street, Inc.

Jon is President and CMO for Wood Street, Inc., a web and mobile design, development and SEO firm in Maryland. Jon blogs regularly on the Wood Street blog and speaks at area chambers and organizations on SEO, design, web content and Social Media. Jon is also a huge WhatCounts fan! (This is Jon’s second guest post. Check out his first one, 3 Ways to Make Your Landing Page Deliver).

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